The Key to Unlocking Spiritual Literacy

To acquire scientific literacy, most people would study in colleges and universities to earn their degree. That is how they learn science. Acquiring spiritual literacy, however, is a different case. To unlock the spiritual, one would need a key that is not found in universities.

When we speak of “key,” a few things come into mind: lock and door. A key, literally speaking, is a small metal tool cut into a special shape to fit into a lock and move its bolt. It is used to open doors or drawers, or things that one needs to have an access to. Normally, a person does not lock anything unless there’s something important in it privy to a few trusted people.

There are many aspects in life, aside from the physical, in which a key can be useful. In literary writing, a reader may need a key in understanding the author’s thoughts and feelings whenever they are expressed with certain depth and complexity. Take, for example, the sonnets of William Shakespeare. A person unlearned of Shakespearean language may not find sense in his sonnets. To poets, however, deciphering their meaning may be quite easy.

Here is one of Shakespeare’s sonnets that has earned numerous commentaries:

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Considered by many to be beautifully constructed, what does this poem mean? To someone who has not the key to understanding the language of Shakespeare, or to breaking the code into which his thoughts are hidden, to him the meaning of this poem is locked. Even with experts, their analyses differ from one another. Some say Shakespeare speaks here of absolute love; others of marriage service; still others say Shakespeare had not made the best choice of words.

Whatever the case may be, it remains a fact that Shakespeare is the author of this poem, and he has a definite message in it. Anyone can make his own analysis and commentary, but it cannot change the intended meaning of the author. However, Shakespeare was not just a poet; he was also a human being. No matter how great a poet he was, his poems were still subject to human error. In his own words: “If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.” This suggests that even if his definition of love is proven to be wrong, he will not accept it; believing that a man can only truly love if he loves with a love that conforms to his definition.

If a man needs a key to understanding words which are subject to error, how much more a key is needed to understanding words that are spiritual? God, as Author of the Bible, has a definite meaning to His words. He has a definite message. And because His words are not subject to error, unlocking the message behind them requires no human analysis.

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With approximately six billion copies sold worldwide, the Bible remains the best-selling book of all time—yet only a few people truly understand it. Numerous critics and scholars have devoted their time studying its pages, but most of them get lost in the meaning of the verses even more. Without the key, they could not unlock the Truth in the scriptures, hence they remain spiritually illiterate.

Proof that not everyone who reads the Bible understands it, religions proliferated. If leaders of religious groups understood the Truth in God’s words, why do their gods differ? The god of the Roman Catholic Church, according to Catholic Encyclopedia, is embodied in the Godhead, which consists of three Persons that “are co-eternal and co-equal. The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and yet there are not three Gods but one God.” This is the Catholic doctrine of Trinity—absent in the Holy Scriptures.

The Scriptures says, in John 14:28 –

“Ye have heard how I said unto you, I go away, and come again unto you. If ye loved me, ye would rejoice, because I said, I go unto the Father: for my Father is greater than I.”

The Lord Jesus Christ Himself said that His Father is greater than Him. He did not say that they are co-equal.

On the other hand, the god of the Iglesia Ni Cristo (Church of Christ), a religious sect founded in the Philippines by the late Felix Y. Manalo, is entirely different. The begotten son of their god, unlike that of the catholic, is a mere man, not a God. In their official magazine, Pasugo, published on January 1964, on page 13, it says:

...

TRANSLATION:

MAN is also the state of being of our Lord Jesus Christ in His coming on the day of judgment. His state of being does not change. He never became a God! A MAN he was born, a MAN he grew up and preached, a MAN he resurrected, a MAN he went up to heaven, a MAN he sits at the right hand of God in heaven, and a MAN he shall come again.

Between the Roman Catholic Church and the Iglesia Ni Cristo, several things are possible: Either one of them is correct, the other is wrong; or both of them are wrong. It cannot be that both of them are correct. Equivalently, it would mean that either one of them has the key, or neither; it cannot be that both of them have the key. And since the doctrine of Trinity of the Roman Catholic Church contradicts that of the Bible, that gives us the chance to consider other choices. Unfortunately, the christ of the Iglesia Ni Cristo is a mere man, and is biblically not qualified to be the begotten Son of God. In I John 5:20, it says -

And we know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we may know him that is true, and we are in him that is true, even in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life.

This leaves our choices lessened by two.

Failure to understand the true message of the Scriptures prompted many to invent their own keys. Some invented codes allegedly found inside or outside the Bible: one is The Bible Code; another is Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code.

In the Bible Code, they say that there is a letter-by-letter sequence in some biblical texts in the original Hebrew language. They use methods such as the Equidistant Letter Sequences (ESL) to decipher biographical information about famous rabbis that are allegedly encrypted or encoded in the Hebrew text. Here is an example of how their Bible Code works:

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Looks like a crossword puzzle, isn’t it? You can actually do this even with Harry Potter books. Some already tried it with Moby Dick. It worked.

The Da Vinci Code, on the other hand, is a masterfully written stupidity. Fibonacci sequence and a few pieces of history put together into an incredibly ugly collage does not make Dan Brown any better than a crackpot. It is evident that he made a lot of research to write such a complex lie and anti-biblical fiction. Yes, fiction it is, and it qualifies as the new Book of Mormons—such a waste of time to read.

If one holds the key, he can open what is closed. Anything that is closed is not closed to him who has the key. It will only be closed to him if he rejects the key. This is what Bro. Eliseo Soriano, Presiding Minister of the Members Church of God International, said in their weekly Thanksgiving Day held 11 October 2008 at the Ang Dating Daan (ADD) Convention Center in Pampanga, Philippines. The topic he discussed: The Key of the Open Book, but Closed to Him who Rejects the Key According to the Bible.

Bro. Eli, host of the 25-year running religious television program Ang Dating Daan (The Old Path), explained that the Bible is both an open and a closed book. To him who has the key, it is open; to him who hasn’t, it is closed. And the key of the Bible is the seeing eyes given by God.

The Bible is a portrait of a beautiful thing that others did not see, because their eyes are different. In the Church of God, we have eyes given by God; seven eyes that see all the goodness of God in us. In the Bible, what we have seen is the righteousness of God, His love, longsuffering, forgiveness, mercy, grace and all His goodness. The Bible was opened to us because God willed to give us the key.

To unlock the Bible, one needs the key. It is not by man’s own efforts or college degree that he would understand the Bible and attain spiritual literacy, but by God’s will. Unless God, the Author of the Bible, open a man’s eye and give him the key to the Truth written in His Book, to him the Bible will remain closed and locked.

The proof that one has the key, he sees in the Bible what all others do not.